As I drove around exploring Morgan City, I spotted the restaurant's name written across the slanted roof in Christmas tree lights. What initially struck me about the restaurant was its quirky but home-like atmosphere. With a drab gray carpet and brightly painted yellow walls, the tables are covered with brown paper, and cheerful waitresses dump mounds of crawfish onto them - no plates required. The restaurant is decorated with all manners of fishing and logging paraphernalia, an illustration of a culture of people who make their living off the land and the sea. I returned to Susie's for three consecutive nights, drawn to the good food and the friendly owners, Susie and Murray.
The mood was different when I returned a month later. The large screen TV that usually shows a sports game was turned to the news, and voices of reporters talking about the oil spill blared in the background. Sitting in the corner of the restaurant, Murray explained the sudden rise in cost of seafood, as fisheries closed and people scrambled for the remaining stocks. Before he became the buyer for the restaurant, Murray was a shrimp fisherman for 30 years. He was born into a family of fishermen, and stays connected to his roots by buying exclusively from his relatives.
The cost of shrimp had gone from $5 per pound to $7.50 per pound, a huge increase when you consider that the restaurant goes through about 100 pounds per week. When I asked him how he intends to deal with the rising cost, he said sadly that he would have to pass the cost onto his customers. But when I asked him what they would do when his family could no longer supply the seafood, he simply said that they would not serve it. I didn't want to ask him the obvious next question, which would have been, "How does a seafood restaurant survive when it doesn't serve seafood?"
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